


The Bunny Hops at Midnight

by Tigerkid14



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 12:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12606220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tigerkid14/pseuds/Tigerkid14
Summary: Sometimes being a cat owner means thinking you are losing your mind.





	The Bunny Hops at Midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crimsoncat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crimsoncat/gifts).



> A special thank you to my cat Mackenzie for being a total weirdo and an inspiration for this piece

The first time is chance, so Natasha simply made a mental note, because that’s the way she’s learned to stay alive, and then she moved on without thinking too much about the incident. The second time is coincidence, but assuming that something is coincidence can get you killed before you ever get another opportunity to rethink things, so while she doesn’t exactly go into high alert, she is on guard. The third time is most definitely conspiracy, confirming everything that came before it, and she begins a sort of mental hypervigilance, not relaxing, listening for even the slightest sound, watching for movement, and waiting for an eventual slip up, anything that will let her catch the sneak.

This does not go unnoticed by Maria, of course. She’s used to Natasha relaxing when they’re inside their apartment. Having both of them there means that small problems usually don’t occur, and generally if there’s something big enough going on for Natasha to be on edge all the time, it’s work related and Maria’s aware of it. This was different. Mostly because there wasn’t anything big going on at work and at work Natasha was practically lackadaisical compared to how she was being at home these days.

It still took almost a week before Maria figured it out though. Natasha was being cagey about whatever was bothering her, insisting it was fine, it was nothing, not in the way that meant everything was wrong and she was hiding it from Maria, but in the way that meant it probably was inconsequential and she didn’t want help sorting it out just yet.

It was the rabbit that did it. It was a small, white, stuffed rabbit with a ribbon tied around its neck like a bow tie. Maria had gotten it at some Easter event the year before and somehow it had gotten tucked into a corner in the apartment instead of passed on to a random child or charity. Maria had seen it in various locations around the apartment and after determining that it wasn’t Natasha on some sort of stuffed animal feng shui kick, figured it was probably Liho playing with it, so she put it out of her mind.

They got home from work one night and the rabbit was on the floor in the hallway near the door, sprawled flat out on the ground. Maria paid it no attention at all, until the part of her brain that was always wired for work, at least until they’d been home long enough to relax, noticed that Natasha was studying the rabbit with an intensity such an object did not deserve.

She was subtle about it, but it was clear in the way she scanned the room, circling around the rabbit, almost like she was checking for hostiles, getting ready to defuse a bomb. But she said nothing to Maria, and after satisfying whatever it was that bothered her, she left the rabbit alone and moved on with the process of arriving home, removing her jacket, and settling in for the night. The incident lingered in Maria’s mind though.

Then after dinner, when they’d spent an hour curled up on the couch together, watching TV, quietly talking, and just enjoying the quiet of each other’s company, Maria got up to go to the bathroom and as she got to the end of the couch she stopped. There, on the ground by the couch, was the rabbit. Glancing at Natasha, she caught only the end of the look her lover was giving the stuffed animal. It was her speculative, eyes narrowed, ‘something suspicious’ look, which she quickly smoothed over to something neutral when she saw Maria’s head turn her way.

Maria rejoined Natasha on the couch a short time later and neither of them said anything about it, but the rabbit was gone when they got up at last to head to bed. Maria tried to put the incident out of her mind, with various degrees of failure. She wasn’t entirely sure what Natasha thought about it.

Then she began to find…not traps exactly, but small trip falls, the sorts of little telltales designed to trace if anyone has moved through a space. The thin line of flour on the floor across a doorway was one of the more obvious ones. It took her an embarrassingly long two days to figure out that the pattern of stray single strands of hair scattered at various critical points in the apartment was another.

And still the rabbit moved. It was in the front hallway some evenings when they got home from work. It almost always appeared at the end of the couch while they were watching TV, as if it was joining them for the activity. Twice she found it on the floor of their bedroom, although each time she did that, she gently picked it up and placed it back in the hallway, facing away from their bedroom.

She moved it gently because she was starting to get the idea that maybe the thing was sentient in some way. She only ever saw it in various places; she never saw it move there. _Moved_ _there_ , she silently emphasized to herself. Surely someone else was moving the rabbit around their apartment. It certainly wasn’t moving itself. It was an inanimate object, after all.

She wondered if she might be finally, after all these years, cracking under the strain of her job.

Though, watching Natasha become equally tense over the same period of time, she wondered if maybe it was getting to them both, whatever it was that was happening here.

It was the morning that she opened the bedroom door to find the rabbit sitting upright in the hallway facing the door that she finally broke. It was _watching_ their door, like it was waiting in ambush for them to emerge. Like a silent fuzzy little stalker, tracking their movements in their own home, waiting for them to let their guard down before it killed them in their sleep.

She took a deep breath, knowing that her thoughts were getting out of hand, realizing that she had been standing in the bedroom doorway without moving for too long because Natasha came up behind her, spotted the rabbit, and tensed like she was waiting for a hit, checking the hallway for intruders while simultaneously rubbing Maria’s shoulders in reassurance.

Then Natasha pounced, springing on the rabbit as if it were a suspect trying to flee, scooping it up in a hard grip and walking it out to the living room, Maria hard on her heels, wondering if this was the psychological breaking point for them both.

Possibly, because Natasha opened the small gun safe they had in their apartment in case of the potentially laughable moment when either of them would ever feel safe locking their weapons away and out of instant reach, even at home, and then she shoved the rabbit into the safe, shut the door, and clicked the handle into place, locking the safe entirely.

She made no comment to Maria as she turned and walked back to their bedroom, though Maria spent a long moment looking at the locked safe and wondering if the rabbit could get enough air to breathe in there, before she realized what she was doing and made herself stop and walk away.

It was the elephant in the room that night. Neither of them said anything about it. No discussion, no “hey, do you think we’ve both gone crazy?” remarks, no acknowledgement that anything strange had happened at all, just the two of them sitting on the couch pretending to watch TV, not mentioning that maybe, possibly they might have missed having the rabbit at the door when they got home, being used to the silent greeting. When Maria got up to go to the bathroom after the first show, she did not remark on the absence of their quiet companion, who usually joined them on the floor at the end of the couch.

It was Liho who broke the silence, Liho who vocalized regularly in pleasant greeting, or demand for food, or who could purr loud enough to sound like engines on take off if she wanted. She was distressed. Mewing as if she was hurt, as if she was desperately trying to find comfort, something beloved, something lost.

She refused to be touched by either of them when they went to check on her, trying to see if she was physically hurt. She even hissed at Natasha when she tried to run her hand over her fur checking for injury, a noise that might as well have been a slap in the face given the expression on Natasha’s at the sound.

Maria finally looked at Natasha and then looked at the safe and back to her lover. Natasha sighed and got to her feet, going to unlock the safe. The instant the rabbit was extracted Liho’s crying meows ceased. Natasha set the rabbit on the ground and Liho walked over to it, sniffed all around it, and then walked away as if she hadn’t just been crying her heart out, as if she’d never seen this rabbit before in her life.

But somehow, when they got up from the couch to go to bed, the rabbit had moved from where it had been placed on the floor near the safe and was back in its familiar position by the end of the couch, with Maria never seeing it move.

Everything was back to normal, or at least, as normal as things got for them. All the tension Natasha had been carrying for the last two weeks at home was gone, a problem resolved and forgotten, and Maria felt drained as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

After they got ready for bed though, coming out of the bathroom, they found the rabbit in the middle of the bedroom floor, sitting upright, watching the bed.

Maria stood still, looking back at it, then turning her head to look at Natasha who had come up beside her.

“Nope.” Natasha’s voice was firm as she picked up the rabbit and gently set it out in the hall, facing away from the bedroom. Then she came back to Maria and kissed her, slowly shifting them both towards the bed.

“Company is one thing, but a voyeur is totally another.” She said as she pushed Maria onto the mattress.

And Maria wholeheartedly agreed.


End file.
